Nick
The first
day of my trip through stem cell transplant hell was the last day I felt good.
When I
checked into the hospital that morning, I’d been off chemo for seven weeks, and
the cancer I’d been diagnosed with was undetectable. I was finally feeling like my old self again,
but I should have known it wouldn’t last.
By the time I checked out, twenty-four hours and one chemo drip later,
I’d gone back to feeling like… well, a cancer patient. I spent the rest of the day within running
distance of the john – let’s just say I had it coming out both ends. It helped to be home, instead of on a tour
bus, but needless to say, Cary and I didn’t have sex that night.
The rest of
the week wasn’t much better. “How in the
hell did I get through the tour like this?” I griped on Saturday morning, when
I woke up still feeling like shit. My
“digestive issues” had cleared up, but all week I’d felt run down, like I had
the flu. It was a familiar feeling, but
I couldn’t imagine singing and dancing that way. I didn’t even feel like getting out of
bed. How had I managed to drag my ass
onstage all those nights?
“I always
wondered the same thing,” Cary replied, offering me a sympathetic smile. She’d been as sweet as ever to me all week,
taking care of me and putting up with my complaining. I think I complained a lot more than I had
during the tour, and maybe that was the difference. I had nothing to hide and no reason to pull
the tough guy routine anymore, so I laid it all out there and acted like a big
baby. “I couldn’t have done it, if it
were me,” she added. She didn’t seem to
mind me being a baby; in fact, I think she liked it better that way. At least I was being honest with her. Truth be told, I liked it better that way,
too. It was easier than having to lie.
That was
the morning I was supposed to start the shots of some drug called Neupogen,
which was the same thing I’d gotten from the doctor in Boston when I was sick
on tour. The way I understood it, its
job was to kick my bone marrow into high gear and get it to make more blood
cells – in this case, stem cells that they’d take out of me in a few days and
put back later. Cary had given me the
shots before, so I wasn’t worried about them.
They were just a pain in the ass – or wherever she decided to stick me.
“I’m gonna
go get the stuff from the fridge,” she said.
“Be back in a few.”
But she was
gone longer than just a few minutes, and when she finally came back, I saw
why. “Oh. My. God,” I groaned
appreciatively, as my eyes panned up and down her body. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Cary tried
to pull a sexy smirk, but she was blushing too much for it to have the right
effect. It didn’t matter, though. The rest of her was just right. She had squeezed herself into a short,
skin-tight, white dress that hugged her curves as it buttoned down her body,
stopping at mid-thigh. Below that, she
wore white thigh-highs and red high heels.
Perched on her head was a little white hat with a red cross, and she’d
put on a fresh coat of red lipstick to match.
My naughty nurse had arrived.
“Not kill
you,” she purred, slinking closer. “I’m
gonna make you feel much
better.” She came around to my side of
the bed, managing to look sexy and embarrassed about trying to look sexy at the
same time. “Don’t you worry,” she said,
expertly flicking off the cover the syringe in her hand. “This won’t hurt a bit. Now drop your shorts, big boy.” But on the last two words, she lost it,
dissolving into a fit of giggles, her cheeks burning redder than ever. “I can’t do this,” she gasped, shaking her
head, her hand covering her face.
“But you
were doing so well.” I grinned up at
her, totally amused. I could tell she
had never role-played before, but I appreciated the effort. “I knew you’d make a hot naughty nurse.”
“Well, I’m
glad you’re enjoying this, at least… watching me degrade myself,” grumbled
Cary, rolling her eyes. Her face was
still bright red.
“Aww, don’t
say that. You’re not degrading yourself;
you’re… highlighting your assets,” I assured her, nodding.
“Right… my assets.”
She turned around, sticking out her butt. The dress cupped it perfectly, stopping just
below. If she bent over a little
further… But she straightened up and
spun around again before I could even finish the thought. “Okay, you’ve had your show. Now seriously, let’s get this over
with.” She flashed the syringe again.
I
groaned. If only that was just part of
the game, too. “Alright…” I sighed,
throwing back the covers and pushing up my boxers so she could get at my thigh. I shivered as she swiped it with an alcohol
wipe, but felt warm again, too warm, when she leaned over and put her hand on
my bare skin. She’d left the top few
buttons of her dress unbuttoned, and I stared into her cleavage, refusing to
watch while she gave me the shot. I was
fantasizing about motorboating those babies when I felt the pinch and the sharp
sting of the stuff being injected. Then
it over, and she was straightening up again, handing me a little gauze pad to
hold against the tiny hole in my leg.
“All done.”
“For
today…” I had at least three more days
of taking these shots to look forward to, before there might be enough stem
cells in my system to “harvest,” as they kept putting it – like I was a farmer,
growing a crop of them. “You gonna wear
that outfit for the rest of them?”
She made a
face, probably wishing she’d never put it on in the first place. Now that she had, I’d never let her live it
down. “We’ll see.”
“I hope
so. That dress… it does a body good.”
“My body or
yours?”
“Yours… but
you can do good things to my body, if you want.
C’mere…” Smirking, I pulled her
on top of me, grabbing a handful of ass as I helped her get situated. Her dress hitched higher as she straddled my
legs, hooking hers around my back. Her
heels grazed my bare skin, but I didn’t care.
It was a good kind of pain; it took away from the throbbing in my
thigh. Cary made a great distraction, I
decided again, kissing her.
“I guess
you are feeling better,” she said, smiling.
I smiled back. “You’re good
medicine. Especially in that dress. I’d feel even better if I could take it off
you, though.” I waggled my eyebrows at
her, already working on the first button.
She blushed
again. “I’d feel better, too.”
***
The day of
the first “harvest,” it was cloudy and unusually cool in California. Of course, that just meant it was, like,
seventy, but seventy degrees in September in LA feels pretty cold. I wore long sleeves and jeans into the
hospital. Cary tried to compensate for
the gloomy weather with a bright yellow top and a plaid scarf that whipped
around in the wind as we walked in. She
held my hand and matched her pace to mine, even though I was moving pretty
slow.
My whole
body ached, right down to my bones.
According to Cary, the bone pain was a normal side effect of the shots;
she said it was a good sign, that my bone marrow must be working overtime,
churning out millions of stem cells. I
took her word for it, but I still felt like an old, arthritic man, shuffling
along beside his much younger, hotter girlfriend. I had to remind myself that I was only a year
older than Cary and still looked thirty, even if I didn’t feel like it. When I wondered what the hell she was doing
with me, I remembered, Oh yeah… I’m Nick
Carter. I’m a hot pop star, and she
wants me.
It was easy
enough to tell myself that, but a lot harder to understand why. Cary was beautiful and could sing like a
bird; she’d been on American Idol and
on tour with the Backstreet Boys. The
doors were wide open for her; she could do anything she wanted, but instead,
she was here with me. I had promised to
help her, and instead, I was holding her back.
I felt
guilty, knowing I had conned her into helping me, into falling for me, into
being with me now. I knew if I said
anything, she would swear she wanted to be with me, but I wondered, How could she? I hadn’t been very good company the last week
or so; I was sick and tired and not up for doing much. She’d already seen me through worse, but I
had a feeling that the worst was yet to come, and I felt bad for putting her
through it. It couldn’t have been easy
for her, after losing her mother to cancer, yet she never cried or complained
or let on to how hard it was. She was
more than I deserved, but I was too selfish to give her up. Cary was good for me, even if I was bad for
her.
These were
the thoughts messing with my head as I lay on a hospital bed, watching her look
around the room. It seemed like she had
run out of things to say, and I wasn’t up for starting a conversation. We were quiet as we waited for someone to
come and set me up for the procedure. I
didn’t know what to expect; I’d been told several times that a stem cell
transplant really wasn’t much different from a blood transfusion, so I figured
they’d just come in, suck some stem cells out through my port, and I’d be on my
way.
As usual, I
was wrong.
First, my
nurse came in and announced, “The doctor’s ordered a catheter placed for the
harvest procedure, so I’m going to take you down to radiology for that to be
put in.”
“Oh, I
already have one of those,” I said quickly, pulling down the hospital gown to
show her my port.
She took
one quick glance at it and shook her head.
“That’s a portacath. It’s not
designed to handle the amount of blood going in and out of your body during
this procedure. You need a Vas-Cath, a
special kind of catheter that goes in your neck. It’s just temporary,” she added quickly, when
she saw the look on my face.
“My neck?” I repeated, staring at her.
“Usually
the neck. It can also go in through the
groin, if you’d prefer that.” She gave
me a wry smile, already knowing what my answer to that would be.
“Um, sorry,
but hell no. I don’t want another tube
coming out of my neck or my…” I left it there, shaking my head. “Just, no.
I thought this was supposed to work like a blood transfusion.”
“It is
similar. Your blood will go out one tube
and into a pheresis machine, which will take out the stem cells and send the
rest of your blood back into your body through another tube,” she explained
patiently, even though I was being a pain in the ass. “If you don’t want the catheter, we’ll have
to put an IV in each of your arms, which means you won’t be able to move much
during the harvest, which takes about four hours. Also, you’ll have to get new IVs put in each
time you come in. If you choose to get
the Vas-Cath, your hands will be free, and once it’s in, it can stay in for the
next few days, until they collect enough stem cells. Then it can be taken out.”
“Okay,
fine,” I sighed, caving in. I knew I was
way too fidgety to handle lying in bed for four hours without being able to
move my arms. A tube in my neck couldn’t
be as bad as that – and it was definitely going in my neck, not the other place. The portacath had turned out to be okay, not
nearly as bad as it had sounded, so I figured this Vas-Cath thing would be the
same way.
Wrong
again.
When I got
back from radiology, I had a giant tube hanging out of my jugular, which split
into two different ends, like the Y adaptors I used to hook up my
electronics. They hooked me up pretty
much the same way, plugging two IVs into the ends of the catheter – line in,
line out. Both lines ran dark red with
my blood, as it was pumped out of my body, through this giant, noisy machine
next to my bed, and back into my veins through the other line. My arms were free, but the catheter was taped
to my neck so it wouldn’t get pulled out.
It was threaded through my vein, all the way down to my heart, and every
time I turned my head, I could feel it pulling on the inside. It freaked me out, and it hurt like a bitch.
While I lay
there getting tortured and feeling sorry for myself, Cary tried to look on the
bright side. At one point, after she’d
been sitting at my bedside for a couple of hours, keeping me company, she stood
up to stretch. “Look at this,” she said,
poking one of the IV bags hanging above the pheresis machine. It was a small bag, about a quarter full of
red liquid. “Those are your stem
cells.” It just looked like blood to me,
but Cary seemed impressed. “There are
probably millions of cells just in that little sample.”
Even so,
they told me I’d probably have to come back two more times just to get
enough. I was discharged with
instructions for how to take care of the new catheter, a prescription for
painkillers, and an appointment for more harvesting the next day. When it was time to go, I looked at Cary and
said, “How am I supposed to just waltz out of here with this thing hanging out
of my neck?” I flicked the ends of the
catheter in disgust, making them swing.
I felt like a freak. “What if
somebody recognizes me?”
My
interview with Ellen wasn’t scheduled to air until the following week, so the
public was still in the dark about my illness.
I didn’t want them to find out the wrong way, through paparazzi photos
snapped of me looking like this. It’s
not like I expected a whole herd of paparazzi to be hanging out at the
hospital, unless they’d followed someone like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears
there, but still, we were in LA. They
could be lurking anywhere, waiting for a sighting.
“Here,”
Cary said, taking off the scarf she’d been wearing. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before,
but when she handed it to me, I recognized it and snickered.
“Is this
one of Leighanne’s Wylee things?” I asked, holding it up.
She blushed
and nodded. “It’s the Brian tour scarf,”
she mumbled, and on closer inspection, I saw Brian’s signature going down one
end of the scarf in big, iridescent lettering.
The other end was bedazzled with the Wylee logo in little, silver
rhinestones.
“You bought one of these?” I asked, laughing
again. AJ and I had ripped on Brian
behind Leighanne’s back about being such a tool when it came to his wife’s
line. He was always modeling scarves and
hats and bags for her. We would never
let him live down carrying around the little man-purse she’d made for him on
the Unbreakable tour, but still, he
had worn it onstage for the encore every single show. The guy was completely pussy-whipped then and
still is. But I guess he knows, just
like the rest of us, that only BSB fans buy Leighanne’s stuff, and only because
she’s the wife of a Backstreet Boy, so he keeps on promoting it.
“I like
it!” Cary insisted, fingering the rhinestoned end.
“You like it
‘cause it’s got Brian’s name on it,” I teased, grinning at her.
“So what if
I do? Here, let me help you put it
on.” She took the scarf back and started
to sling it around my neck, but I twisted away.
“You think
I’m gonna-? Fuck,” I hissed, feeling the catheter pull again. I touched the dressing tenderly, making sure
it was still in place.
“You okay?”
I
grimaced. “Yeah. But you think I’m gonna walk out wearing this fruity thing around my neck
instead?”
Cary
shrugged. “Take it or leave it. If you end up on TMZ tonight, do you want
them questioning your sexuality, or wondering what you have implanted in your
neck?”
They didn’t
need a pastel, plaid scarf to question my sexuality; that kind of speculation
was nothing new. I shrugged. “Point taken.
Go ahead. Just, please, don’t tie
it in a bow or anything.”
She
laughed. “Guys do wear scarves, you know.”
“Not
straight guys. And not purple plaid
scarves with sparkly shit on them.”
“Okay,
okay, fine… I’ll put it on backwards, so the sparkly stuff doesn’t show. It’s really not purple, by the way; it’s more of a lilac.” She grinned at the look of pure disgust I
gave her, as she fashioned the scarf around my neck. By the time she was done, I’m sure I looked like
a total queen, but better that than a sideshow freak.
As we left
the hospital – quickly – I wondered what I would do the next day. Wear a turtleneck? Pop my collar? There really aren’t many good ways for guys
to cover their necks without looking like pretentious douchebags. I decided the 8 Mile look – a hoodie, with the hood up – would be my best
option. I’d remember that for tomorrow.
I hadn’t
completely realized it yet then, but slowly, the last shreds of normalcy I had
clung to were being stripped away. At
some point soon, I would no longer care about what I looked like or what people
thought. And I would never feel “normal”
again.
***